


Cloud Nine

by kurtiepie



Category: Glee
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-14
Updated: 2013-04-14
Packaged: 2017-12-08 12:23:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/761272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurtiepie/pseuds/kurtiepie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A "missing scene" from Never Been Kissed. Takes place between Teenage Dream and "prejudice is just ignorance".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cloud Nine

Kurt has never broken so many rules in one day. Never. But now, it seems like he won’t be able to stop until he’s broken them all. Maybe he was on the fast track to becoming a certifiable badass, breaking laws and disregarding authority figures and crashing his motorcycle through store windows. If so, then he’s a badass with a sudden craving for some place new, even if it means sacrificing his weekday wardrobe for a boxy prep school uniform.

Actually, he might have just gone insane, which would certainly explain why an idea like that appeals to him at all.

His newfound wild streak started earlier today with ditching school. Leaving campus for lunch is an option for students, one a surprising few take, and when he left he just... didn’t go back.

Instead, he took a little drive over to Westerville, a nice if not typical upper-middle class suburb two hours away from Lima. Pushed back from the houses and locally-owned shops, in a world all its own, sat Dalton Academy. The building itself was so charming to look at, but the real magic could only be found within its walls.

Despite the nefarious reasons for his visit, or at least the guise of them – Puck’s slight had been nothing other than a wide-open opportunity, almost a challenge, that Kurt didn’t mind taking him up on one bit – he couldn’t resist trying to take everything in. He tucked away every sight worth seeing in the back of his mind for later consideration; in the moment, he tried not to look too awestruck and out of place. At least until all that became irrelevant.

He came out of the whole adventure with perspective, more good vibes than you could shake a stick at, and one brief incident of terror caused by his own wit-wandering and a gray Silverado unwilling to stop for anyone until the absolute last minute – and a catchy song playing over and over in his memory.

For the rest of the afternoon, he’s had to stop and remind himself that, no matter how much it feels like it (Blaine _certainly_ knows how to make a crowd feel special, there is no doubting that), that performance hadn’t been meant for him. But in spite of his best efforts, he can’t bring himself down off that cloud. So he just lets it be.

And he hasn't been great at hiding it, if the reactions of everyone he came in contact with are anything to go by.

His dad was the first:

“What’s got you grinnin’ so much, kid?”

“Hm? Oh, nothing. It’s just been a really good day.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

“Thanks.”

“I got a call from the school, by the way. Somethin’ about not comin’ back after lunch.”

“Did you? That’s so strange...”

“Kurt.”

It happened again a little while later during a phone call with Rachel, who had only stopped pressing for information on the Warblers when she realized she was getting next to nothing out of him.

“ _Kurt._ ” Kurt jolted at the sharpness of her voice.

“ _What?_ ”

“Could you at least _try_ paying attention? You’ve been giving me nothing but one word answers the entire time. Actually, you’re just making indecipherable noises now.”

“Mm.” He picked up the remote to the TV and flipped through the channels, watching the pictures flicker by without seeing what they were.

“Kurt! Look, I have no idea why you’re so distracted, but I _cannot_ believe you don’t want to share this information with me. As the leader of the glee club, it’s vital for me to know-”

“I already told you,” he said, turning the TV off and tossing the remote to the opposite end of the couch. “They were good. They sang a song and they were really good. That’s all there is to say.”

“But what about-”

“ _Goodbye_ , Rachel.”

The evening folded in much of the same way, with distraction and constant tugs back into reality. He hasn’t even noticed night has fallen until his phone rings and the display says it’s 9:05.

“S’up?” he mumbles at the mike as he turns on speaker phone. He stares at his textbook, knows that the pages have words on them, but he can’t make heads or tails of what any of them mean. _What subject is this now?_

“Did you really just say ‘s’up’?” Mercedes asks.

“Oh, yeah, sorry, busy with homework. Distracted,” he says. He picks the book up off his bedspread to peek at the cover. _U.S. Government. Did I even have assigned reading for that?_

“Rachel told me you were acting weird earlier, but I didn’t believe how bad it was until now.”

“Why’d you talk to Rachel about me?”

“Spill it. Now.”

“Mercedes,” Kurt laughs, closing his textbook so he could place it on top of the others. He turns speaker phone off as he brings the phone to his ear. “There’s nothing to spill, I promise. You and I both know Rachel’s a little...” His eyes drift to look up to the ceiling as he thinks. He leans back against the headboard, nudging his books to the side with his foot, stretching out his legs. “Well, ‘nutty’ would be a nice way of putting it, I guess.”

“I know you ditched to go spy on that glee club in Westerville.”

“And I don’t deny that accusation, so can we please put the brakes on this interrogation and have an actual conversation? As equals?”

She doesn’t say anything for a moment, like she needs to contemplate it, before barreling on anyway.

“Rachel said that she couldn’t get the dirt out of you no matter how hard she tried. She also said that when you finally started to pay attention, you hung up on her. So what happened at that place that’s got your brain so melted?”

Kurt sighs, long and loud, knocking his head back against the headboard. “Nothing happened. I told her everything she needed to know.”

“It just sounds like you’re keeping secrets,” she says, her voice soft for the first time yet. “And we don’t like it. So could you at least stop keeping secrets from _me_? I promise not to tell Rachel.”

A grin spreads across his face then, laughter bubbling up from his chest.

“Okay, okay, _fine_. There may have been a guy. Perhaps.” His smile grows uncontrollably wider at the squeal that got him. This is an all-new experience for him, gossiping about a boy that’s _real_ and _not_ Finn Hudson. It makes his heart flutter in his chest (though it’s only a pale imitation of how it had behaved in the presence of the boy himself).

“Why didn’t you _tell me_ , Kurt? You can’t just keep something like from your best friend!”

“Well, you did start off a little aggressive when I picked up the phone.”

“Forget about that, you _have got_ to tell me everything. What’s his name?”

“Blaine,” he answers, grinning so hard his face hurts, feeling the heat turn up under his skin just saying his name. It’s all he can do to keep himself still; he can’t stop moving his legs, crossing and uncrossing them and bending one then shifting to the other.

“Oooh, very cute. Sounds like a private school name.”

“Shut up.”

“How’d you meet him?” she asks. So, Kurt tells her.

He talks for the better part of an hour, pausing only when Mercedes manages to get a word in and ask him a question. It’s like a floodgate has been opened and he can do nothing to stop the words from pouring over. He’ll start listening to what he’s saying and it makes him feel absolutely ridiculous in the best way; as much as he loves romance, he never thought he would be the one that got to gush about a person’s eyes or their smile or the sound of their voice. But it’s happening, and it makes him feel lightheaded and giddy and so many other good things, more good things than he’s felt in a while.

Then he gets to the performance.

“Wait, wait. This guy’s a Warbler?” He’d been waxing poetic about something or other, but his train of thought disappeared into nothingness at the renewed edge in her voice.

“Um, yeah,” he says, hesitant. “He’s their lead, actually.”

“ _Kurt_ ,” Mercedes groans; like he’s done something completely stupid.

Kurt nudges up from his slump against the headboard, his spine straightening as his defenses rise.

“What?”

“You _know_ what. I can’t believe- After all that stuff that happened with Jesse and Rachel-” She sighs, as if she were pained.

“This has _nothing_ to do with Jesse and Rachel.”

“Really, you don’t see a single similarity.”

“I never even told him why the reason there!”

His heart starts to pound in his chest, frantic, as he gets more and more agitated with the tone Mercedes is taking with him. It’s like she thinks she knows better than him, but she can’t possibly know anything; not to mention the way she’s making him feel young and dumb, even though she clearly _doesn’t understand_ —

“Honestly? I don’t think he had to be told. If they’re as good as you say they are then they probably get people spying on them all the time. The guy just sounds like a really good, really charming actor.”

“Mercedes, I really don’t think he’s the kind of person who would do something like that.”

“Really. And how do you know that?”

Kurt feels his throat constrict, his eyes wired open like he’s on a caffeine buzz, as he tries to think of something to say back to that. It’s the last thing he expected to hear after such a wonderful day that had felt like so much of what he wanted, even if it meant he’d been living in his own little dream-world to experience it. He almost preferred it there, because compared to this? It didn’t matter. He would have kept this happiness to himself if he had known it would just be ruined in the end. A bit of lucid (vivid, _real_ ) dreaming never hurt anybody.

But in reality, how does he know Blaine isn’t that kind of person? How could he? Beyond a vague gut feeling, all he has to go on is what happened: Blaine led him to the commons, hand in hand, and sang to him— Well. Sang while staring at him. A lot.

“I don’t know,” he says after some silence. “He didn’t seem like a bad person. But it’s hard to explain.”

“Wait a second. Do you even know if he’s gay or not?”

“He-”

“Did he tell you?”

Kurt draws up his shoulders as he sinks down into the pillows, wishing for his mattress to just swallow him whole. When he answers, he can barely hear his own voice. “No.”

“Yeah, I’d watch my back if I were you. Something about this doesn’t add up and you might want to cool it until it does.”

A burst of anger surges through him, blurs his vision and makes him talk before he recognizes the words.

“Oh, I’ll tell you what doesn’t add up. What _doesn’t add up_ is why someone can’t be nice to me without it meaning there’s something wrong. What _doesn’t add up_ is why I can’t have a moment in the day where I’m actually happy without it getting thrown back in my face! How does _that_ make any sense?” He looks over at the books near the edge of the bed then punches his foot out, kicking the stack of the side and onto the floor.

“Kurt, I’m sorry, I really am.” To her credit, she does sound it. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt over some jerk that only cares about competition.”

“I really don’t think Blaine is that way, though! He was...” Kurt sighs, closes his eyes. “He was wonderful. He was kind, and,” He takes a breath, steels himself, tries to tell himself he needs to say it, even if it makes no sense. He doesn’t want to, it makes him feel ridiculous just thinking about it, but he wants her to understand. He toys with the edge of the comforter, still as neatly folded as it had been when he left for school that morning. “Well. He held my hand. It’s not a big deal. In fact, it sounds kind of silly to me now that I've said it. But it matters to me. Even if he is straight, it...”

The fact that Blaine held his hand made a difference, even if he can’t put the reason why it mattered into words. He has thought about it all afternoon. In so many ways, it made Blaine kind, and polite, and friendly, and open. Nonjudgmental, if Mercedes is right and he is a straight guy who's just super comfortable singing Katy Perry songs and staring at other boys while doing it. And kind, polite, friendly, open, nonjudgmental people don’t lie or do things to hurt others. That one small act, cordial if nothing else, makes all the difference in the world.

But he can’t find a way to make Mercedes get that. She didn’t see it, she wasn’t there. All she knows about Blaine is what Kurt told her and, apparently, he’d done a pretty shitty job of painting the picture for her. Then again, the Jesse debacle hadn’t just been some bad break-up a friend went through; everyone in the club went through it. Jesse gathered his troops and had them throw eggs at her, knowing exactly how it would make her feel. Her personal horror at having something like that done to her had been their entire objective for doing it in the first place.

Kurt tries to imagine Blaine doing something like that to him. The thought is... unsettling, to say the least. But possible, no matter how much he wants to deny it. He can’t be sure of what Blaine would do. Kurt doesn’t know him.

“I don’t know, Kurt, I mean-”

“No. You’re right,” he says. “I have no clue about this guy. I can’t say what he would or wouldn’t do because... Well, I don’t know him.” He laughs, but there’s nothing good in it. Any good feeling he had is gone now. All he wants to do is sleep.

“I’m sorry, Kurt.”

“I know. I’m gonna go.”

“Okay, boo. Goodnight.”

“See you tomorrow.” He ends the call.

Instead of leaving a mess for himself to trip over in the morning, Kurt gets up and collects his haphazardly strewn books, then stacks them by his nightstand. He’d gotten ready for bed earlier, having showered and moisturized and put on his pajamas before realizing it was still early in the evening. _Maybe I have been a little too out of it._

Why does this always happen? It happened with Finn, Kurt distinctly remembers that. It also happened with Sam, the memory of that short-lived idea hitting him with a shock. Love – or attraction, or whatever you want to call it – always got him quick and left him off-kilter without any help or hope for salvation. He used to figure that came with the package; to be completely stupid messed up over someone meant you _want_ them, you _need_ them, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it? He thought so.

Now, though, he just feels like he’s been jerked back on a bungee cord before he's even noticed he jumped, and it’s uncomfortable. It’s compression when he would rather breathe instead.

Kurt realizes he didn’t get to tell Mercedes that he was going back tomorrow to talk to some of the council members. It hadn’t even crossed his mind until now that this meeting could mean trouble for him, but after an evening spent with his common sense turned off, the realization makes him want to bang his head against the wall.

He cringes as he crawls under the covers, wants to berate himself, _why why why am I such an idiot!_

He falls asleep before he remembers to turn off the light.


End file.
